PCOS Natural Treatment

Suffering from PCOS? Endometriosis? Or just imbalanced and painful periods? While this post is focused on PCOS, these practices are deeply healing and can be used with many different reproductive or gut health issues.

Step 1 – Stop Synthetic Hormone Birth Control:

My first and most important advice for those wanting to heal is to get off of birth control. I realize that this will cause most of you to gasp because it’s all you know, but bear with me here, even if you decide to stay on birth control, and at the very least inform yourself.

I know that birth control can help with the pain, so it is rough to hear going back to that, but it’s the most powerful place to start.

What exactly are you doing when you go on birth control? Are you healing PCOS? No. You’re masking the symptoms. Just as someone would use ambien to sleep, they are in no way getting to the root cause of why they aren’t sleeping to begin with. Birth control does the same thing for PCOS.

While the rest of the practices below will help, they will work 99.9% better if you are not taking synthetic hormones. Here’s why:

PCOS starts with an imbalance in hormones. Typically stemming from very low progesterone, and an imbalance of testosterone and estrogen. This imbalance can come from many different things (continue reading below and you’ll see the ways you can impact your hormonal health).

Our body wants to produce it’s own hormones, and birth control shuts off your ability to do so. <- Re-read this sentence.

When we take birth control we are shutting down our body’s ability to build its own hormones and dosing it with fake hormones. This is why you feel better for a time being, or get your “period” (which I put in quotations because it’s not a real period but simply a withdrawl bleed from hormones).

You feel better because the pill is putting fake hormones into your system, but they ARE NOT the same are your own hormones. Your body so badly wants to produce its own and birth control is working against that.

These “fixes” will not last not for the long-run, because they aren’t real fixes.

If you decide to have children and go off of the pill, all of those issues you’ve been stuffing down will usually pop right back up and rear its head in infertility. In fact, IVF treatment facilities get most of their clients from women who have had PCOS, have been on birth control for years to “regulate” it and have recently come off of it. If this isn’t a smack in the face I don’t know what is.

Heal yourself BEFORE you get to this point.

Want extra support to come off of birth control without too much pain? My friend Nicole Jardim shows you how here.

Step 2 – Naturally treat PCOS:

Whole Fat Foods

PCOS is linked with low saturated fat intake. Check out my article explaining why saturated fats are good (and which foods are the best to eat) as well as what fats to stay away from. Fats: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Essential fatty acids found in high quality fish oil or cod liver oil are also very healing to the ovaries. I love Dr. Dave’s Best fish oil and Green Pastures cod liver oil.

Chaste Tree Vitex

Also called Vitex Berry, Chaste Berry, Chaste Tree, etc., this herb increases your natural progesterone in your body. It isn’t progesterone itself, it simply helps your body to produce more. These are the kinds of things we want!

Remember increased progesterone = less period pain. Pain is a common complaint with PCOS or endometriosis. I’ve seen massive results with this herb personally and through my clients.

Vitamin C

Vitamin C is very nourishing to the ovaries and adrenal glands. High vitamin C foods are best (red peppers, dark leafy greens, cherries, citrus fruits) and I also like to take a vitamin C supplement: liposomal vitamin C by Mercola or LivOn Labs are my favorites.

Bone Broths

PCOS is also linked to a mineral deficiency, and bone broths are an amazing mineralizing and healing food. They heal our gut lining so our body can actually absorb the nutrients that we are eating.

For anyone who has used antibiotics OR birth control for an extended period of time (which acts very similar to antibiotics on the gut) you may not be absorbing the fats, vitamins and minerals you need to be able to make hormones.

Check out how to make bone broths, and more detailed information on it here.

Apple Cider Vinegar & Cinnamon

Both are fantastic blood sugar stabilizers. I pour a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in my water for some extra flavor (and nourishment), and cinnamon in my tea, smoothie, or on my oatmeal. Keeping blood sugar stable (high fat & high protein and low sugar & carbs) is a key component to keeping healthy hormone levels. When our blood sugar is too high the body uses hormone precursors to try to regulate it, so nothing is left to build the hormones we want.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is actually a hormone and not a vitamin, and is one of two hormones that has a receptor site on every cell of the body (the other being thyroid hormone). So it’s safe to say it’s quite important.

Vit D is a precursor that the body needs to be able to make estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, and much more. It has been studied to lower depression and prevent up to 16 different kinds of cancer. The best way to get vitamin D is through the sun, but if you just can’t get enough sun I recommend supplementing with a vitamin D liquid or spray, and take along with magnesium and Vit K2 for optimal absorption.

There are many vitamin D kits available online to do an at-home blood prick test of where your levels are. Optimal in my opinion is to be at 70 – 100 ng/ml, which most of us are quite far from.

Toxic Load

How toxic are you? What kind of beauty products and cleaning products are you using? Do you know the toxic load of what you choose to eat?

I truly believe that our ovaries, what produce life, can read the amount of toxins in our body and decide whether or not this is a safe world to have a child in. If you aren’t having a period, you haven’t released an egg. If you aren’t releasing eggs, your body does not feel balanced enough or safe enough to bring a child into this world. This is also how stress affects fertility.

Similar to a thyroid disease, if we are too toxic, our thyroid will slow down metabolism thinking our body is not in a safe environment. Our bodies are IMMENSELY in tune with the environment and adjust accordingly, how else do you think we’d still be here on earth?

Check out these extra articles on the affects of toxins on your body and endocrine system (PCOS stems from an imbalance of the endocrine system) and how to choose better products: here andhere.

If we had ANY idea of how much of this junk is in our body we would be disgusted. Just because we can’t see it in the food doesn’t mean it’s not there. We also can’t see the teeny tiny hormones in our body, but they are making a big enough impact to cause cysts on our ovaries, infertility, and pain.

Exercise!

Some studies show our bodies can heal up to 8 times faster when exercising, some show 25% faster healing, in any case it’s pretty universally agreed upon that if you want to stay healthy you better be moving. 4x a week for 30 minutes is plenty when healing a hormonal imbalance, any more and your body can switch into a stressful fight or flight mode and cortisol will eat up all the juicy hormone precursors. We want to move and sweat but we don’t want to stress our body.

Give yourself at least 6 months on this protocol to feel better, especially if you’ve been on the pill for a couple of years. Give your body time to heal, to learn to produce its own hormones, to feel strong, calm, and regular, and to ease any future pain of infertility.

Hi, Brenna. I stumbled upon your website while looking for a good broth to drink. Thank you for all this great information. I may have endometriosis, though the doctor is not 100% sure. The reason she’s not sure is because my periods aren’t painful, however for about 5 days during ovulation I am in extreme discomfort. I can still function, but sitting and walking can be very uncomfortable. My bowels appear to get constricted during this time, as well, making BMs very painful, as well. I was on birth control for many years and didn’t realize I had this problem until I went off the pill to get pregnant, which proved to be a painful process, as well! It’s been a problem now for many years and I’m finally starting the perimenopause phase of my life, so I’m hoping it will resolve on it’s own soon enough. I was just wondering, though, if you’ve ever heard of this and might have any thoughts on it? Thanks, so much!
LB

Hi I just want to thank you for this site and ideas! I have mild PCOS and a dairy allergy (so contraceptive is out of the question as it’s cased in it) so the specialist I had 2 years ago gave me metformin, vitamin D tablets and told me to loose weight. I lost 13kg but the metformin never settled with me in the stomach and changed my moods so much I stopped taking them after 6 months and researched natural remedies. I’ve heard about cod liver oil and apple cider vinegar being the best thing so I tried it and began having periods again after another 6 months of nothing. Natural remedies do work 🙂

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